General Mills, Target, Best Buy, and Fingerhut Bare It All at Interactive Marketing Confab

05/15/08

So, you wonder, do major consumer brands “get” social media, or are they even starting to deal with it at all yet in any meaningful ways?  Well, thanks to our local 850-member strong Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association, we had a chance to hear from some of our more well-known corporate biggies last night.  It was a gorgeous, sunny, 70-degree evening in downtown Minneapolis, but a crowd of 300+ jammed inside (on the third floor of the Solera at 9th and Hennepin) to hear a panel that had been billed as Who Controls Social Media in the Enterprise? [I guess we can assume the hope is that marketing will do that, and not the lawyers… :-) ] The panelists were:
• Jim Cuene, Director of Interactive at General Mills
• Gary Koelling, Creative Director/Social Technology, Best Buy
• Jason Kleckner, Manager of Information Architecture, Target
• Brad Smith, VP eCommerce & Digital Marketing, Fingerhut Direct Marketing
• Moderator: Michael Kraabel, Group Creative Director, Gage Marketing

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You Have to Love How One Beer Company Does Corporate Blogging

04/26/08

Corporate blogging is still a little understood art.  And very little practiced, to be quite honest, outside of the tech field. You think most companies are blogging?  Guess again. According to this ongoing survey, only a measly 11.6 % of the Fortune 500 are doing it—as of about a week ago, to be exact. (Not to speak of the even smaller percentage of those doing it well, I might add, whether in the Fortune 500 or elsewhere.)

But there was an absolutely great front-page piece in the Wall Street Journal on Thursday: For All You Do, Bud, This Blog Is About You.  Here’s an excerpt:

(Jim) Arndorfer, 37 years old, is a full-time employee of Miller Brewing Co., the U.S. arm of SABMiller PLC. A former reporter for Advertising Age, he now runs Brew Blog, a free Web site dedicated to breaking news about beer. Especially news about Anheuser-Busch’s beer.

Brew Blog is the latest and perhaps most unlikely front in Miller’s drive to rattle Anheuser. Mr. Arndorfer tracks the St. Louis company’s every move, from earnings reports to management changes. He relishes revealing details of its products before Anheuser does.

Okay, this is funny!  I think it’s one of the best front-page pieces in the Journal in a long time.  [But then, I would—I’m a blogger!] A great, big shout-out to the reporter, David Kesmodel.  The competitive antics of these two big brewers is no secret; it’s the stuff of ad industry legend.  But, more than this, I think the Brew Blog is a great case study in corporate blogging. Here are some reasons why....

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03/30/08

No, I’m not talking about the relatives of your blogger friends. I’m talking about a term that’s becoming as frequently used in the PR business as “media relations.” How PR professionals interact with bloggers is taking on more and more importance—so much so that it’s now actually being studied. That’s right, all you bloggers out there—now we’re legit: the PR people are officially studying what we do and how they can influence us. In an announcement this week, the two firms behind the study announced a new web site, where you can read about their ongoing findings, as well as best practices in the field: BloggersandPR.com.

It’s a very nice, well organized site, with lots of information, and I would encourage anyone either new to PR, or just interested in getting up to speed with the latest thinking in blogger relations best practices, to bookmark it.  What are the biggest surprises in the findings so far?  Well, to me they are....

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03/26/08

Big happenings yesterday, with Yahoo announcing it will endorse the “OpenSocial” tech spec that was initiated by Google and is also backed by MySpace, Ning, and several others. Yahoo and Google also said, on a conference call they organized for the media, that they, along with MySpace, were forming a non-profit foundation for OpenSocial. The most significant thing I heard from the conference call was that OpenSocial apps will now be able to reach more than potential 200 million users by next week, based on all the social networks signed on to date. That is huge—more users than MySpace and Facebook combined. Which social nets of Yahoo’s will get OpenSocial apps initially?  The firm wouldn’t say, but one wonders about their oldest and best known: Flickr. For the complete lowdown on yesterday’s announcement, see today’s Wall Street Journal coverage.

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03/22/08

I learned a lot at the recent O’Reilly conference, “Graphing Social Patterns.” (You may have seen my coverage of the event at my other blog, and also on my Twitter page.) But the most interesting thing that was confirmed for me personally at this event was that, for social networking to really become successful from a business standpoint, it must somehow start to enable the one big missing element so far: commerce.  Advertising is not going to cut it as a sole business model, a fact that’s becoming increasingly evident.

With clickthrough rates continuing to decline, ad spending hardly going up in the current economic environment, and the lack of ad relevancy getting talked about more and more (especially on social networks!), suddenly advertising is not seen as the panacea it once was. It would appear that commerce—selling real stuff—must be the next big thing.

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